Zynga's Pioneer Trail is like The Oregon Trail without the typhoid

Zynga has finally released The Pioneer Trail, the long promised sequel to FrontierVille on Facebook. Those familiar with The Oregon Trail will be right at home here but there's no indication as yet that you can die of dysentery. The game abandons many of Zynga's social gaming trademarks; rather than doing anything related to farming, players must instead journey across one of three maps. The creators claim that each one of these maps is five times larger than any of the outfit's previous games. Significantly, you can only play the game with three friends, as each player is awarded specific skills necessary to reach "Fort Courage" at the finish. The company hopes that by forcing four players together it will create "intimate gaming" experiences (translation: you can't give up if you get bored, friends are relying on you). Each map is said to take three weeks of hard pioneerin' to complete and if that still leaves you cold, remember: there's always that history textbook waiting in your app queue.